Warner Announces "On Demand" DVDs

[silverscreenselect]

Warner, which has a film library of about 7000 titles, including many of the old MGM movies, has announced it will be releasing many of its archive films essentially on demand as part of its "Warner Archive" collection.

About 150 titles are in the first group, with 20-30 more each month becoming available. For $20, people can go to the Warner website and order a title which will then be individually burned onto a DVD-R and put in a box with studio produced cover art, so that the case looks much the same as regular DVD titles. It will take about a week to ship most titles.

Most DVDs are pressed in a mold (much like old LP albums) and mass produced. Studios release a handful of archive films each month, and with the exception of a dwindling handful of classics, most of them are bare bones, no extras efforts that usually retail for $10-15 (although you can often get deals on these). Blockbuster seldom carries these titles, but Netflix does. The studios spend varying amounts of time and money cleaning up the master prints from which they are working so that video quality varies greatly. Some look terrific, and some look like bad public access tv video. Needless to say, it's highly doubtful there will be any Blu-ray release of these titles.

It's doubtful Warner will spend much money cleaning these prints up so the quality of what's available will depend on the condition of the master prints. The films range from the 1920's to the 1980's and future releases will include some classic Warner TV like Maverick. Some of these titles were previously released on VHS, but some are completely new to video in any format. They will also be available for downloads for $15 each.

TCM had earlier made a handful of its vintage films from the 1930s available on essentially the same basis, but this Warner effort is much more ambitious with a wider variety of movies.

For fans of old movies, this is good news because most of these films had so low expectations that they would never be released on traditional DVD. However, I can't see many people spending $20 apiece for these movies, and there won't be much of a secondary market for them either. If Netflix decides to carry them, it might be worth it for me to get a Netflix membership just to get a chance at seeing a few of them.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/dvd ... mand_N.htm

Anyone interested in seeing the catalogue of titles can go to www.wbshop.com.